Tuesday, March 31, 2015

These skies full of winged beings were brought into existence by Giandomenico Tiepolo (1727-1804), son of the more renowned Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770).

Giandomenico inherited his father's visual vocabulary – the weightless goings-on among clouds; the mythical creatures and caricatures; elderly exotics, magicians, temples fragments. The son did little to alter his father's formulas, contenting himself with faithfully carrying them forward.

Monday, March 30, 2015

The Metropolitan Museum in New York now makes most publications from past years freely available online. Because they do, I could browse the museum's Bulletin and discover Recent Aquisitions : A Selection : 1996-1997. Among the back-stories of the various objects was the following about an Egyptian statue broken apart in ancient times but fated to be put back together again in New York at the end of the 20th century –

"The opportunity rarely arises of reuniting
long-separated sculptural fragments to create
a virtually complete Egyptian statue. The
head of a god, acquired by the Museum in 1919, has long held a prominent position
among works from the time of Amenhotep III.
The torso, in a private collection for three
decades, was only recently recognized as
belonging to the head. The attire and the divine war-scepter held vertically in front of
the body identify it also as part of a god's
statue. The style dates it to the reign of
Amenhotep III. Although the surfaces of the
two pieces indicate that they spent most of
the past three millennia in different environments,
the dimensions and the position of
the break in each suggested a match. When
brought together, they fit exactly.
The specific god represented here cannot
be determined, since no identifying inscription
or attributes are preserved. However, the
statue almost certainly belongs to the series
of divine images installed by Amenhotep III in
his vast mortuary temple, which once stood
behind the so-called Colossi of Memnon in
western Thebes. The sculptures symbolized the
congregation of gods at Amenhotep's heb sed, a
festival commemorating thirty years of his reign
and intended to rejuvenate the aging king."
Elsewhere on the Met site I discovered that the stone called granodiorite can only be distinguished from granite by proportional analysis of component elements (though one assumes the Egyptians themselves had other ways of making the distinction). I searched for additional Met sculpture from Egypt made of granodiorite. Here are the ones with highest index marks for visual allure –

Sunday, March 29, 2015

On Sunday afternoon we played with Mabel's doll named Pinky, the one that came in a box with a large wardrobe of clothes last Christmas. The two of us had to function as a coordinated team in order to make the tiny socks go on.

Friday, March 27, 2015

Staff photographers at the Metropolitan Museum in New York spend their days pursuing the most revealing angles to allow viewing of the small scenes from myth and life represented on the sloping external curves of the kylix, the wide shallow two-handled drinking-vessel of classical Greece.

COMRADES OF TIME

"Hesitation with regard to the modern projects mainly has to do with a growing disbelief in their promises. Classical modernity believed in the ability of the future to realize the promises of past and present – even after the death of God, even after the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul. The notion of a permanent art collection says it all: archive, library and museum promised secular permanency, a material infinitude that substituted for the religious promise of resurrection and eternal life. During the period of modernity, the 'body of work' replaced the soul as the potentially immortal part of the Self. . . . But today, this promise of an infinite future holding the results of our work has lost its plausibility. Museums have become the sites of temporary exhibitions rather than spaces for permanent collections. The future is ever newly planned – the permanent change of cultural trends and fashions makes any promise of a stable future for an artwork or a political project improbable."